Software

I have updated my Calibre Debian repository to include packages of the upcoming version 3, currently version 2.99.10. As with the previous packages, I kept RAR support in to allow me to read comic books.

A snap of Kodi, the hugely popular open-source media center software, is available for testing. Announcing the snap package on the Kodi forum, Kodi team member ‘DaVu‘ explains that with “more snap packages are available for Ubuntu-based systems” they are “happy to provide a Kodi snap package as well.”

Wireshark, the world's most popular open-source, free and cross-platform network protocol analyzer, has been updated recently to version 2.2.7 and it's now available for download on Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

Coming almost two months after the release of Wireshark 2.2.6, this new maintenance update is here to patch read overflow vulnerabilities in the DOF and DHCP dissectors, infinite loop issues in the Bazaar, SoulSeek, DNS, and DICOM dissectors, as well as a memory exhaustion bug in the openSAFETY dissector.

The Linux version of the company's popular office software suite is compatible with Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix, and other platforms, supporting both 32 and 64 bit computing environments. Regular updates are made possible with input from the open source community.

Coming two weeks after the release of Wine 2.9, which improved support for many Windows games and apps, including The Witcher 3 and Need for Speed: The Run, Wine 2.10 launches with even more improvements and new features.

Prominent new features of the Wine 2.10 development release include the implementation of an initial version of the Android graphics driver, dictionary support in WebServices, multiple improvements to Direct2D, user interface improvements in RegEdit, as well as some OLE clipboard cache fixes.

A new upstream version of UDisks2 was released on Friday (June 2nd) -- version 2.7.0. People following the recent development of UDisks2 and our recent blog posts [1] [2] should know that this is a big version bump which can only mean one thing: the pull request changing UDisks to use libblockdev where possible was merged! Which is almost 100 commits with changes.

Many of us here are familiar with GitHub, but some of us have been looking for a good, open-source client application for the platform. This is where XDA Senior Member k0sh stepped up and created FastHub. Not only is it fast, easy to navigate, beautifully designed, and open-source, but you can download it from the Play Store or the XDA Labs repository.

The promise of automation always has been its ability to manage a wide range of tasks across all your systems, whether they're in your own data center or somewhere in the cloud. But in order to automate, you need to know what you have, and that's getting harder these days.

We've all come across orphaned cloud VMs and instances, perhaps spun up for a quick test by a developer, created as a bit of shadow IT or merely forgotten during the press of the latest product release. Regardless of why they were created and forgotten, these instances pose quite a few risks to your time, security and budget. After all, the meter's pretty much always running on cloud instances, orphaned or not.

Er… Only that’s it; there’s no mention of if, much less when, Linux users will be able to experience the (admittedly terrible) changes.

For a cross-platform communication service trumpeted as being “available everywhere, so you can go anywhere”, skipping an entire platform is a bit of an oversight.

Microsoft signs off their announcement by poking the penguin in the eye, saying Skype “…can be with you for all life’s moments, no matter where the world takes you—on your favorite devices, to smart speakers, and beyond.”

The dtrx tool is an universal archive extractor for many archive types. dtrx stands for “Do The Right Extraction”. It is a free, open source archive extraction tool. You don’t need to have multiple extraction tools for handling different types of archive files. dtrx will take care of almost all types of archive files such as tar, zip, cpio, deb, rpm, gem, 7z, cab, lzh, rar, gz, bz2, lzma, xz, and many kinds of exe files, including Microsoft Cabinet archives, InstallShield archives, and self-extracting zip files. dtrx will extract the archives into their own dedicated directories. Also, it makes sure you can read and write all the files you just extracted, while leaving the rest of the permissions intact. And also, it can find the archives inside the archive and extract those too.

Last week, we reported that Kingsoft would halt the development of WPS Office for Linux, following tweets that they would open source the code of the office suite later this year and let the community continue work on the software. Kingsoft has now backtracked on what it had said earlier.

​We all love paintings. Paintings are a sort of art that are mystically beautiful, exploring and blazing. Nowadays on Linux, there are many powerful applications that are available for painting and drawing purposes but Krita is one of them that stands out of everything.

Most people don’t think of Linux as a great platform for image editing and digital art, but even though Adobe has never ported any of their Creative Suite to Linux, it’s still a capable operating system for creating digital artwork and working with images.

These five tools provide artists and photographers with strong open-source alternatives to the expensive industry-standard tools on Linux. They’re all free, well documented, and actively developed by the open-source community.

Although I love using open source software, I work for an organization that relies on Adobe. Most of what I do is created in Adobe, but whenever I get a chance to branch out, I turn to open source first to supplement and enhance my work. I had an opportunity recently to do just that.

The Scribus Team is proud to announce the release of development release 1.5.3, another major step on the way to Scribus 1.6.0.

In addition to being a milestone in terms of typographic features, the Scribus Team is convinced that 1.5.3 has become stable enough to be used in new workflows and documents in a similar way to the transition from 1.3.3.x to 1.4.0 after the release of version 1.3.6. However, care must be taken, because this is still a development release.

Please note that MAAS 2.2 will replace the MAAS 2.1 series, which will go out of support. We are holding MAAS 2.2 in the above PPA for a week, to provide enough notice to users that it will replace 2.1 series. In the following weeks, MAAS 2.2 will be backported into Ubuntu Xenial.

We suspect many users have jumped between Firefox and Chrome/Chromium over the years. Some power users may have switched to keyboard-driven apps like Qutebrowser. Or maybe you’re still rocking Lynx! In any case, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll read out the best in our upcoming podcast.

​Databases are a crucial tool for any developer or a development enterprise. If you are a software developer you already know that your application needs a database to store data. One thing to have in the count is to choose the best database for your application. There are two types of databases, SQL and NoSQL databases. The first one being the oldest. SQL databases are very famous and still being used largely around big organizations and most of SQL solutions are paid but, there are good free solutions out there with MySQL Community Edition and PostgreSQL on the top. In this article, we will let you know more about this two databases and how to migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

Users looking for a Microsoft Office clone on Linux will be disappointed to hear that WPS Office’s development on Linux has been halted. The most recent build for Linux was released almost one year ago, with the most recent version being v10.1.0.5672 Alpha.

The fact that development had stalled was raised after one Twitter users reached out to WPS Office to ask why there hadn’t been a new release for a while. The response came back saying that it was "on a halt" and that it needs “community builds”; there’s little chance that community builds will become a thing within the next few months given that WPS Office is not even open source, making community maintenance somewhat of a challenge.

GNU libmicrohttpd is a small C library that is supposed to make it easy to run an HTTP server as part of another application. GNU libmicrohttpd is fully HTTP 1.1 compliant and supports IPv6. Finally, GNU libmicrohttpd is fast, portable and has a simple API and (without TLS support and other optional features) a small binary size (~32k).

This lightweight web server continues to be HTTP 1.1 compliant and provides a simple API for integration into other GPL applications. There are security fixes in libmicrohttpd uncovered by the Mozilla Secure Open Source Fund initiative. There are also fixes for building on Linux in some conditions and other basic fixes and optimizations.

Golem Project, creator of the first global market for idle computer power today announced it released Golem 0.6.0 for Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows. The team stated that the majority of changes are not directly visible to the user, but there are a few noteworthy modifications.

The chart above shows the percentage market share of the 4 major browsers over the last 6 years, across all devices. The data is from StatCounter and you can argue that the data is biased in a bunch of different ways, but at the macro level it's safe to say that Chrome is eating the browser market, and everyone else except Safari is getting obliterated.

The 3.1.0 release of the Mailman mailing list manager is out. "Two years after the original release of Mailman 3.0, this version contains a huge number of improvements across the entire stack. Many bugs have been fixed and new features added in the Core, Postorius (web u/i), and HyperKitty (archiver). Upgrading from Mailman 2.1 should be better too. We are seeing more production sites adopt Mailman 3, and we've been getting great feedback as these have rolled out. Important: mailman-bundler, our previous recommended way of deploying Mailman 3, has been deprecated. Abhilash Raj is putting the finishing touches on Docker images to deploy everything, and he'll have a further announcement in a week or two." New features include support for Python 3.5 and 3.6, MySQL support, new REST resources and methods, user interface and user experience improvements, and more.

Cockpit is free, open source Server administration tool that allows you to easily monitor and administrator single or multiple Linux servers via a web browser. It helps the system admins to do simple administration tasks, such as starting containers, administrating storage, configuring network, inspecting logs and so on. Switching between Terminal and Cockpit is no big deal. You can the manage the system’s services either from the Cockpit, or from the host’s Terminal. Say for example, if you started a service in Terminal, you can stop it from the Cockpit. Similarly, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal interface and vice versa. It is capable of monitoring multiple Linux servers at the same time. All you need to do is just add the systems you wanted to monitor, and Cockpit will look after them.

Buttercup is a cross-platform, free, and open-source password manager with which you can remotely access any of your accounts using a single master password. It features a modern minimal UI, password imports from 3rd-party apps, and basic merge conflict resolution.

FreeFileSync is an open source free to download and use software that can sync your files easily to another disk while maintaining permissions and other important stuff. It is cross platform so you can use it on any OS without any problem. Let us see how to download and use it in Linux.

More in Tux Machines

With only two days left until the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system hits the Final Beta milestone, developers are still working on adding finishing touches to this release, and they've again improved the Ubuntu Dock.

NethServer's Alessio Fattorini just informed us today about the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming NethServer 7.4 Linux server-oriented operating system, which is based on CentOS 7.4 and comes with various improvements.

Firefox takes a Quantum leap forward with new developer edition

Earlier this year we wrote about Project Quantum, Mozilla's work to modernize Firefox and rebuild it to handle the needs of the modern Web.
Today, that work takes a big step toward the mainstream with the release of the new Firefox 57 developer edition. The old Firefox developer edition was based on the alpha-quality Aurora channel, which was two versions ahead of the stable version. In April, Mozilla scrapped the Aurora channel, and the developer edition moved to being based on the beta channel. The developer edition is used by a few hundred thousand users each month and is for the most part identical to the beta, except it has a different theme by default—a dark theme instead of the normal light one—and changes a few default settings in ways that developers tend to prefer.